People give a lot of prescriptions about who you should marry. One of the things I was told through the years is “marry someone who is a better person than you.” As good as it sounds, it’s rather unrealistic advice. After all, if you are uneducated, unsymmetrical (physical handsomeness generally being regarded as symmetry, across cultures), and evil, you will have a hard time attracting someone who is educated, symmetrical, and good. Realistically, you’ve got to have a more “give-and-take” approach: in some ways they will be better, but in other ways you will be better.
Victor is better than me in a lot of areas, some more obvious than others, such as athleticism (though for the record, I’m the better swimmer and I will always hold that over his head, even if it’s not true one day ;).
In all seriousness now, one area he’s got me in is faith. It’s stronger, it’s bigger, it’s better.
Luck was on my side because he married me, the girl who has historically struggled with her faith, and still struggles. But that’s how his faith is: he sees potential in people. So he put some of his faith in me.
His faith, though in some manners so foreign to me, was and is extremely attractive, like how a glass of ice water perspiring diamonds on a marble kitchen countertop looks when you are dehydrated.
Less than 2 months after our quiet, informal engagement, in a moment when I was—admittedly—questioning our crazy decision, he woke me up with this text (not your typical “good morning, babe”):
In the design of God for our lives, it does not matter the situations we walked through in the past, nor the deserts we crossed. They could not stop and will not stop what God has prepared for us and our families. You are not coming to Rep. Dominicana simply to come to Rep. Dominicana. God has great plans for our lives and his design is perfect to deliver us grand things. Or again, we are not united because it is simply natural for a man and woman to unite—God has the marvelous for us, mi amor! And things that no eye has seen, no mouth spoken, no ear heard...this is what the Father in his infinite mercy has prepared for us.
Like, who says things like that, let alone believes them? Mine is the generation of disbelief. We are the sleepless logicians who don’t put hope in heroes, be they gods or men. The leaders who led our parents’ generation in spiritual revival are, in their later years, failing my generation with their debauchery. We don’t believe in men and we barely believe in God—I mean, maybe on a good day when our tax refund arrives on time to cover our medical bill; but even then it only strengthens our faith in a God who is sardonic.
To believe that God has a plan that is 1) unstoppable and 2) marvelous, even when it includes suffering and loss, is a counter-cultural, counter-generational belief. Considering the state of global affairs, it’s a crazy belief.
But crazy, I’m realizing, is the definition of faith—or at least of faith that is radical, the faith that is the faith of my husband, the faith that is growing in me.
See, Biblical Christianity doesn’t ultimately make sense. Oh sure it’s organized. Sure there are bookshelves of books written by people who reasoned their way to faith. But if Christianity really made sense, we wouldn’t be having the crisis of faith we are today in the US.
Faith is crazy and we are not ready for crazy.
We are not ready to call a collection of manuscripts written by different authors across thousands of years a coherent book inspired by God himself.
We are not ready to take that same book literally.
We are not ready to pray.
We are not ready to preach.
We are not ready to serve the church.
We are not ready to foster or adopt.
We are not ready to sing.
We are not ready to care for the elderly or disabled.
We are not ready to confront abuse.
We are not ready to be faithful to our partners.
We are not ready to give up easy access to safe food and modest healthcare.
We are not ready to forgive our enemies.
We are not ready to donate the money we need to fill our gas tank.
We are not ready to move to a hard place where our skills would make more of an impact: an inner city, a Native American reservation, another country.
We are not ready to take up our crosses.
We are not ready to be called fools for our insane decisions.
We are not ready to be crazy.
I was not ready.
But I was ready to be loved hard by a man who, in terms of faith, is the definition of ready.
I was ready to have two big, strong hands grab mine and share faith with me like when one plane shares jet fuel with another while flying over the majestic breadth of the Pacific ocean.
Don’t get me wrong, I still feel foolish for all the insanity in my life.
But in the overused yet somehow still profound words of Jim Elliot, he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.”
“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”
(Hebrews 11:1-2, 6)
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